Sam Palmisano, IBM chairman, president and chief executive, claimed that during this decade, smarter technologies will spur sustainable efficient economic growth and development in business, government and society at Chatham House in London.

Palmisano outlined IBM's "smarter planet" concept, last year at the Council on Foreign Relations in New York City, namely, that inexpensive but ultra-fast computer resources were instilling machine intelligence into all parts of society, but especially into the design, manufacture and delivery of goods and services worldwide.

At Chatham House yesterday, Palmisano emphasized how embedded computing resources were imbuing this machine intelligence into trillions of everything items--from household appliances to automobiles--as well as nationwide systems, from railways to power grids. To boot, all of this data is being communicated over the Internet.

From this colossal amalgamation of diverse data, Palmisano proposes applying smart data harvesting and analysis techniques to reduce costs, improve efficiency, raise productivity and improve the quality of all society's products and services worldwide. Smart technologies are even more important today because they are helping to propel the worldwide economic recovery--stimulating job creation, making industry greener and solving the deep problems that caused the global financial crisis in the first place.

Palmisano went on to outline IBM's efforts to make a smarter planet, as well as offer his predictions for how smarter technologies will unfold over the next 10 years. For example, IBM's deployed traffic congestion management solutions, according to Palmisano, have already reduced traffic volume by 18 percent, CO2 emissions by 14 percent, and increased public transit use by 7 percent.        

In health care, IBM's smarter systems are making vital information available at the point-of-care, thereby improving operational efficiency by 10 percent. Similarly, smarter payment processing has reduced costs at the Bank of Russia by 95 percent. And in the U.S., areas deploying smart electricity meters have already saved consumers 10 percent on their power bills and cut peak power usage by 15 percent. Likewise, supply chain costs to retailers have been cut by 30 percent, inventories reduced by 25 percent and sales increased by 10 percent, due to smarter analysis of what customers want and making those items more visible on store shelves. 

But to meet the challenges of the future, Palmisano proposed even smarter applications. For instance, IP traffic will reach a trillion gigabytes over the next three years, mandating smarter software analytic tools to extract the patterns, correlations and outliers that enable decision makers to anticipate, forecast and predict future scenarios that would have been total surprises without those tools.                                      

Smarter technologies produce more from fewer resources, extend legacy infrastructures and enable next-generation systems with more inherent sustainability, higher efficiency and stronger resilience to unexpected changes.

"The good news is, it's happening," said Palmisano. "Making our planet smarter is in everyone's interest."